Leave It All
This entire video was created without a video camera. One of the characters I created for this project was fully rigged with flowing hair. A couple other characters were more simply defined.
Leave It All Music Video hyperlink

Window Jump
This project is in a rough animation blocking phase. The environment is 3D modeled. A mixture of keyframe and motion capture techniques are in use in this super-hero moment test.
Window Jump Animation Test Hyperlink3D Environment Hyperlink

Geo-locating Jake on Orcas Island

Except for a single photograph at the end, the entire video is CG. I had lost touch with many people during the course of rebuilding Challenge for six months without much phone contact. This was to show those people, who cared, where in the world I was.

I created an Earth using a combination of textures from the Blue Marble project, and purchased satellite imagery (for closer views) The terrain originated from digital elevation maps provided by the USGS. I developed technique to quickly work with a 100-million polygon scene so that I could work with it in near realtime.
Orcas Island ApproachRowboat Animation Hyperlink

Realtime Characters
I worked in a Pipeline Engineering group for a project that a Pre-Viz team that needed semi-realistic appearing 3D characters to work in realtime for a director to be able to work on a digital set. The initial model provided was in excess of 50,000 polygons, and did not work very well in a realtime situation (especially when multiple characters were added to scenes).

I led a team to understand and document the process for training others. The model provided was bare bones geometry without any textures.
Beyond the management duties, I was also personally responsible for:
Texturing the model.
Converting the model to a low-polygon version.
Creating custom UV maps for the low-polygon model.
Normal mapping the low-poly model to appear like the high-poly version.
Transferring textures from the high-poly model to the low-poly model.
Rigging the model for MotionBuilder.

Others in the group worked on rigging the model for XSI, and experimenting with realtime shaders.
Realtime Characters hyperlink

Other Interesting Experiments


If you like to see some other experiments, I have a Web page for some tests from May–August 2004.
Imagebased modeling | Lighting | High Dynamic-Range Imaging | Camera Mapping & Compositing